Opening reception: Friday, May 4th, 6 - 8 PM
New York, April 12, 2012—C24 Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in North America by İrfan Önürmen. The exhibition will present a selection of works produced since 2004, comprised of collages, paintings and stacked newspaper sculptures; all addressing the impact of the media on human experience and its visual representation.
In a variety of forms, Önürmen unveils the relationships and discrepancies between personal and public experience as seen through the lens of the contemporary media. With a visual language founded in broadcast and other public channels of information, the artist deconstructs the aesthetics to expose the disparity between reality and representation. In the series Crime Watching Önürmen turns to Turkish television and reveals the communicative pollution embedded within mainstream media in a group of monochromatic figurative paintings. In the Gaze Series, the artist depicts familiar looking figures whose identities are fictional inventions, inspired by characters found on the internet. Made from layers of tulle, these works form softly colored portraits that refer to the composition of pixels through the material’s texture. Önürmen’s Gaze Series combines various elements from different visual sources to create personalities that appear familiar only through their persistent presence in our collective unconscious.
In his relief series titled Panic, Önürmen addresses the visual excess of contemporary culture with large stacked newspaper sculptures. Using newspaper as material and content, Önürmen carves a landscape of images and erased texts that suggest the inflection of media driven anxiety upon the public.
The works in the exhibition at C24 Gallery occupy the interstitial space of the practical realm and a utopia exaggerating the readymade reality found in newspapers and other public media. Önürmen edits and embellishes these outlets through his practice to address the contradictions of contemporary social constructs.
About İrfan Önürmen
İrfan Önürmen was born in Bursa, Turkey in 1958. His work has been shown extensively throughout Turkey, and in Europe including solo exhibitions at Pi Artworks, Istanbul; The Göruntü Art Gallery, Adana; Siyaz Art Gallery, Bursa and many others. Önürmen's work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at venues such as the Museo Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea, Polignano a Mare, Italy; Istanbul Biennial, Antrepo, Turkey; Akademie Der Künste, Berlin, Germany; Kulturdezernat der Stadt Frankfurt, Germany and others. Önürmen lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.
CLICK FOR LINK TO ARTIST'S PAGE